House Republicans narrowly reject effort to end Trump’s war with Iran

House Republicans on Thursday defeated legislation designed to end the Iran War, marking a win for President Trump and another setback for the constitutional purists fighting to reaffirm Congress’s unique powers to use military force overseas.

The vote was 213 to 214, with one Republican — Rep. Thomas Massie (Ky.) — bucking GOP leaders to support the resolution. One Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), joined most Republicans in opposing it. Republican Rep. Warren Davidson (Ohio) voted present.

The practical effects of the vote are negligible. Even if the resolution had passed, the Senate has failed on multiple occasions to adopt a similar measure. The most recent of those votes came on Wednesday, when the upper chamber easily beat back a Democratic war powers resolution by a tally of 47 to 52, largely on partisan lines.

Still, the failure of the House bill also sends the political message that both chambers of Congress — by failing to rein in Trump’s unilateral powers to conduct war with Tehran — have endorsed his authority to do so.

Heading into the vote, Democrats thought they might have convinced enough Republicans to join their side. They staged the vote in part to pressure those “on the fence” GOP lawmakers to approve the measure. Their failure to peel off those Republicans reflects the outsized influence that Trump maintains over the party.

A similar resolution, sponsored by Massie and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), was brought to the floor in the first week of March, when it failed by a count of 212 to 219. Two GOP lawmakers had supported that measure — Massie and Davidson — while four Democrats had joined most Republicans in sinking it.

In the weeks since then, however, Trump has struggled to articulate a rationale for launching the attacks — a joint operation with Israel — while sending mixed messages about the intended length of the conflict, the nature of its objectives, and a strategy for getting out.

Iran’s Islamic regime, meanwhile, remains in power, while gas prices have jumped above $4 a gallon around the country, undermining the Republicans’ promises to slash consumer costs heading into the midterm elections.

Democrats hoped those dynamics would help push the latest war powers resolution over the finish line.

Yet while most of the country opposes the Iran conflict, Republican voters maintain their support for the president’s actions — a major factor in the defeat of Thursday’s measure.

Democrats, meanwhile, have seen a shift in favor of the effort to rein in Trump’s war powers. Of the four Democrats who opposed the Massie-Khanna resolution on March 5, three of them — Reps. Greg Landsman (Ohio), Juan Vargas (Calif.) and Henry Cuellar (Texas) — flipped their votes on Thursday to support the latest measure.

Each of those three lawmakers cited different reasons for their switch. Landsman said the military objectives in Iran have been met; Vargas said the humanitarian crisis facing Iranian protestors had been alleviated; and Cuellar said the president’s grace period for providing a rationale for the war had expired. Their change of heart, however, was not enough to get the legislation passed.

Sponsored by Rep. Greg Meeks (D-N.Y.), the senior Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the resolution seeks to assert Congress’s unique authority to “declare war,” as delineated by Article I of the Constitution. Meeks, Khanna and others have spent the last few weeks lobbying more Republicans to get on board to ensure that the measure would pass this time around.

Still, their decision to call the legislation to the floor on Thursday was a gamble. Heading into the vote, Meeks said there were four Republicans who were “on the fence” and wouldn’t say where they’d land. The only way to test them, he said, was to bring the resolution to the floor and see

“I don’t know where they are, so I just decided to go with it anyways,” Meeks said a day earlier. “Because I can’t keep them on the fence.”

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